Mark, can you provide some historical background for the emergence of the Labor Party?

The Labor Party came together in the mid-1990s, coming out of the rise of neoliberalism, which started in the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter. It really accelerated when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, with massive attacks on workers’ organizations and standards of living and provisions for working people in this country.

The firing of striking air traffic controllers by President Reagan in 1981 triggered an orgy of union busting that swept through basic industry and the public sector and made it virtually suicidal in many instances to go out on strike. So we lost the biggest and best weapon that we had, or had it severely compromised.

This was also the era when globalization really took root — neoliberal globalization, which is massive mobility for capital and minimal rights for workers. We were dealing with figures like [cutthroat corporate executives] Albert Dunlap, who was called “Chainsaw Al,” and Frank Lorenzo, who drove two unionized airlines into bankruptcy. Jack Welch, General Electric president, famously boasted that if he had it his way, he would have all of his factories on a barge, and he would tow them to wherever the labor costs were cheapest.

That was what workers were experiencing. And the complete inability to respond to this crisis initially is not unlike today’s Democratic Party at the beginning of the Trump administration. All of this stuff was hitting us, and people were completely unprepared to respond to it. The initial labor union analysis of this situation was that we were under a regime called “Reaganism,” which was a uniquely reactionary brand of Republicanism, and that what we needed to do was rebuild and restructure and relaunch the Democratic Party.

We did just that. In 1992, we elected a guy named Bill Clinton as president. We did that with intensive labor engagement and labor support. He wasn’t the first choice of a lot of the unions, but they almost all lined up behind this guy. And we had high expectations coming out of that election — we thought that a lot of this stuff was going to stop. [There was the] promise of labor law reform and a whole series of other things.

But we were met with numerous and escalating betrayals under the Clinton administration, beginning with abandonment of any pretense of support for labor law reform and a totally botched, corporate-oriented health care reform that ended up going into the toilet, taking health care reform off the table for another fifteen years. [There was] an attempt to eliminate the few remaining rights that poor and unemployed workers had to social support, called “welfare reform.” Mass incarceration began under Bill Clinton.

Then the topper of all toppers, for many workers, was the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA], which institutionalized the rules of globalization for working people, and workers immediately understood that this was going to destroy what remaining bargaining power they had and what remaining economic security they had. And it could only have been passed by a Democratic president, because they needed to marshal a few extra Democratic votes in order to get it over the top. So the outrage was boiling at the surface within the labor movement and other movements.

The other thing that emerged, particularly during the Clinton era, was this idea that originated in the UK under Margaret Thatcher: that there is no alternative — that no matter what, the markets have to be fed, and you’re just going to have to accommodate yourself to these things. Clintonism, to me, really embodied that whole vision. [We began to realize] that neoliberalism was more than just an electoral deviation of a two-party system, that it was a new [era], and workers needed to think about how to resist under those terms and conditions.

Throughout the ’90s, there was a series of long, protracted strikes and lockouts that often drew widespread support and solidarity from around the labor movement and other social movements: strikes like the Pittston Coal strike, where workers camped out in the thousands in front of the coal company and [at one point] seized a coal facility and held it for [four days]; and the Decatur, Illinois, “War Zone,” where there were three overlapping lockouts and strikes that took place, with National Guard troops on the streets for months and thousands of supporters coming into town to stand in solidarity with them.

There was all of this turmoil, and people began to understand that we needed to build something new out of all of this. In 1995, new leadership was elected in the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations], in the only contested election in the history of the AFL- CIO. The New Direction folks came in saying that we’re going to organize and we’re going to develop a smart and strategic response to the rise of capital. The plan was to organize a million new workers a year. We also had new leadership during this period in the Teamsters union, the largest union in the country. Ron Carey, a militant activist supported by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) was elected. Things began to coalesce around the idea that the labor movement was beginning to strategically revitalize itself and build more power for itself.

As the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, and the vicious anti-communism that characterized almost every segment of the labor movement began to dissipate, people could talk to each other about ideas in ways that were verboten in the labor movement for many decades. This kind of thing also helped stir the pot.

My union was the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union [OCAW], which is now a part of the Steelworkers union. We were lucky to have a legendary labor visionary named Tony Mazzocchi, who was always a significant national player in our union. Tony got elected on a coalition slate in 1988, and part of the program of that slate was that the union would explore the possibility of independent labor politics.

The slate actually kept its word on that issue. The OCAW began by surveying our own members, asking them what they felt about the two parties. Something like 60 percent of our members told us that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represented the interests of working people, and the time had come to think about some new options.

We took that as the beginning of a mandate; we moved that through a series of discussions and resolutions at district councils and other meetings. Then in the early 1990s, the union designated Tony Mazzocchi, and gave him staff assistance and other resources, to go out and talk to working people about the idea of organizing a labor-based political party. We launched an effort called Labor Party Advocates [LPA] in 1991, which was exactly what the title said: we were people who were advocating for a Labor Party.

There was a series of hundreds of meetings and union halls and union conventions and discussions and debates that continued to build momentum. Everywhere we went, everywhere we administered a survey, majorities of workers told us they were fed up with both the Democrats and the Republicans.

We would go back to the leadership and show them that. A lot of leaders would tell you, “Yeah, it’s a good idea, but the members would never accept the idea of a labor party.” Show them otherwise, [we thought,] and maybe we can move them.

We did a cold mailing to 13,000 locals in the United States, in 1993 or so. Somehow we came across this mailing list, and we got a huge response from that, and out of that pressure came together to launch the Labor Party at a 1996 convention.

[Two notes] about that. First, in retrospect, looking back today, what was particularly unique to me about that convention was that the overwhelming majority, well over 90 percent, of the delegates at the founding convention, were union members, and that most of them were elected or appointed by their union structure, whether it was a local union or a district council or whatever, to be there on behalf of that organization.

Second, Tony Mazzocchi, all throughout the ’90s and the early 2000s, would say time and time again that we have got to build a party for working people. If we fail, workers will turn to an ugly, fascist-oriented solution to their problems. We have to provide the structures and the narrative for workers to move to change these things, or we will be dealing with fascism. Here we are today.

Howard, can you talk a bit about the Labor Party platform that you helped draft?

I want to say one more thing about the convention so you get a sense of how significant it was. There were 1,300 delegates representing nine international unions and one hundred local and state labor bodies, and over 1.2 million organized workers that were represented at that meeting in Cleveland.

I was part of the interim steering committee that began to move this thing from LPA to a Labor Party, and I had the honor of being on the program committee, from its early stages all the way through to the final events at the convention.

The process of developing that program was a long one; it involved a lot of feedback from workers. Les Leopold and his Labor Institute developed a program called “Corporate Power and the American Dream,” and he led that discussion along with other LPA members, involving over 3,000 activists in twenty states. That yielded hundreds of suggestions about what an economic agenda for working people might look like.

Then Les Leopold, Adolph Reed, and I set out to try to develop an eleven-point program or so that we would present to union leaders at the beginning, as a draft. We got a lot of heat for some things, but we revised it.

That brought us to the convention. Then we got there four days before the convention officially started; there were five or six of us from different unions, and we worked night and day. We brought it to the floor, and then there was more debate. There was a debate about abortion; some of the members of the Black Caucus wanted stronger statements about what was happening with the burning of black churches at the time and some other things. We incorporated a number of these suggestions and brought it back to the convention. It eventually passed, and people were really thrilled to have that program.

Although the program was developed in 1996, it is as relevant today as it was then — in fact, maybe more so. It is, I think, a great basis to begin discussions about a lot of the issues of the day that are very important: Securing employment for all; the importance of the public sector, which is now under attack like it’s never been attacked; a worker-oriented approach to trade policy; and universal health care. A great deal of that program was incorporated into Bernie Sanders’s program for his presidential campaign.

It is a thoroughly progressive program for economic justice, and it recognizes that there’s a profound conflict of interest between capital and labor. In that program, you will not find any references to “win-win” programs, which a lot of the AFL-CIO unions were engaging in at the time, and no discussion of labor-management cooperation schemes. Instead the program preamble concludes by saying:

[T]he Labor Party understands that our struggle for democracy pits us against a corporate elite that will fight hard to retain its power and privileges. This is the struggle of our generation. The future of our children and their children hangs in the balance. It is a struggle we cannot afford to lose.

I want to make a quick point about the debates on identity politics and class politics, which the Left has been embroiled in for quite a while now. In contrast to the identity politics debates that have preoccupied the Left, one could argue that the Labor Party’s sixteen-point program actually contests the notion there are clear-cut divisions between issues of economic justice and other social issues, particularly around race and gender.

Important issues that truly speak to the needs of all sectors of the working class are comfortably woven into the Labor Party’s entire program. Although there is no separate page on women’s rights, feminists will find that most of the critical issues such as equal pay for comparable work, protection against sexual harassment, paid family leave, and the right to choose are presented under appropriate headings throughout the program.

More important, perhaps, these issues are discussed within a context that should make sense to most working people as we struggle to unite around a program that empowers all of us. To highlight a few more points from the program: it starts off with an argument that we should amend the Constitution to guarantee everyone a job at a livable wage. It says everyone, in the private and public sectors, needs a guarantee of a right to a job at a living wage — one that pays above-poverty-level wages and is indexed to inflation. In today’s world that comes to a minimum of about $10 an hour.

That was 1996, and some people thought we were crazy. The preamble to the Constitution promised to “establish justice, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. But for working people, all this means nothing if we don’t have the right to a job.” That put us on the map with a unique program to talk about job security.

Les did a lot of work on how to penalize corporations for laying off workers. The program says laid-off workers should be paid two months’ severance for every year of service. We wanted to make it expensive for companies to lay off workers and then use that money to beef up their stock prices, which is going on so often here.

Then of course there’s “Restoring workers’ rights to organize, bargain, and strike”; “End Bigotry: An Injury to One is an Injury to All,” which integrates issues of discrimination into a workers’ program for equal rights for everyone. The platform guarantees “universal access to quality health care, including unimpeded access to a full range of family planning and reproductive services for men and women, including the right to continue or terminate a pregnancy.”

Then we have some innovative discussions about more time for family and community; protecting our families; quality public education for everyone; stopping corporate abuse of trade. That, I think, is a really good response to Trump’s version of rethinking trade.

Number twelve, “Revitalize the Public Sector,” is so germane to what’s going on. The public sector is under attack like it’s never been under attack in recent history. I think this is a great response to that, which explains the importance of the public sector to working people.

We also have “Build a Just Transition Movement to Protect Jobs and the Environment,” which was something that Tony Mazzocchi was involved in most of his adult life.

How and why did you structure the Labor Party in the way that you did? What was the strategic thinking behind the way that the Labor Party was organized and set up?

We had a couple of ideas when we launched Labor Party Advocates. Idea number one was that a party of labor has to have labor at the table and participating from the very beginning. You can’t loop them in at a later date — you have to build that into the whole nature and the structure of the party.

The second idea was that the participants must own the politics of the Labor Party. We had this saying — I think Tony Mazzocchi initiated it — people would come and say, “We ought to do this. We ought to do that.” Tony would say, “If you can get that passed in your union hall, then you can come down here, and we’ll talk about it.”

It was like, if you want to think about these politics, think about how you engage with working people around these politics and how you can move these issues. That’s how we’re going to build this party from below: from the felt concerns of working people, you can construct a whole vision of how a just world ought to look.

And just like in a union organizing drive, you build unity around what unites us first. Once you have that structure, you can use the culture of solidarity that begins to emerge to start engaging with workers on more divisive and difficult issues. If you start with what divides us . . . as an organizer, I’ve never found that works. We tried to implement that vision when we launched Labor Party Advocates, as a style of work.

Another issue, I think, is there is a fundamental challenge in trying to organize this Labor Party within a labor movement that did not necessarily already have a class-struggle orientation. Did you see it as part of your task to transform unions? How did you balance between challenging or pushing the unions, and then accommodating the unions to keep them on board in the party?

I think that the Labor Party was an attempt to deepen and broaden and raise expectations within the labor movement of what we could do. Because when there’s no political expression of working-class interests out in the larger world, you just become narrower in your focus. Even if you’re a visionary labor leader, what are you trying to promote? You’re basically limited to what you can win at the level of your workplace while it’s being undermined by the tides of corporate power.

So, in a way, the whole idea of the Labor Party was to have that vision out there, so that we could all see there’s something beyond this defensive fight that we’re waging for our pensions and against plant closings and all of the stuff that we were facing. It’s hard to conceptualize that without a political vehicle for labor.

The labor movement was at the time and still is the largest member-funded entity in our country.

Unions have democratic structures. Many misuse them, but I would still argue that the labor movement is the most democratic part of our society. It’s certainly more democratic than nine zillion grant-funded nonprofits that have no constituency at all.

So part of [building the Labor Party] was building this vehicle to make it possible to have a broader vision for the labor movement as a whole. Obviously there were unions that were not going to get on board immediately. But there were quite a few that did. And, in particular, at the level of the locals, because Tony had been going around talking about the Labor Party idea for a very long time at this point, And Labor Party Advocates had been around for five years. As the Clinton betrayals came in and piled up, there was already a base of people who had heard this idea.

I think we all felt that the Labor Party doing its work would be transformational. But there was not an explicit task to go and try to transform unions — it was actually explicitly the reverse, that we were not going to go in and interfere with the internal workings of other unions because that was going to be problematic.

What we did is we structured the Labor Party so that unions could join at whatever level they were comfortable with. In the case of my union, UE [the United Electrical Workers], or Tony Mazzocchi’s union, OCAW, and a couple others, the national union came in, and that brought with it all the locals and intermediate structures. But for the great majority of unions that were joining, they were doing it at the local level or at the district level. And there were structures just for everybody who was operating at that level.

You could also join as an individual member, with very little say-so, because that’s back to Mark’s point — if you can’t move your own local, why should you be here having a major say-so for everyone else? You needed to represent a body to have some say.

But what we were trying to do was lead by example, to get out there and act in a principled way and talk about the issues that needed to be talked about and show how you could organize working-class folks into the movement like this. That by itself creates a challenge for the rest of the labor movement. It either has to catch up with that or get left behind.

It wasn’t an accident that a lot of the unions that got on board and were active were very progressive unions and did value democracy in their unions. And they were setting the pace that way too. In thinking about the future, I would argue you’d have to have a critical mass of unions that are moving in that direction.

As Carl said, you don’t want to make that a condition for being part of [the party]. But if you don’t have that, it’s probably not going to move that way. And those unions probably wouldn’t be interested in the Labor Party in the first place.

Just as a small structural point, it’s important that unions couldn’t just give money and then have a say in the Labor Party. They had to actually recruit members, to have a certain percentage of members be dues-paying members of the Labor Party in order to have a seat on the National Council.

In terms of the challenges of balancing traditional economic demands with issues around race and social, cultural, international issues — and I’m thinking here about the abortion issue and, in the Clinton era, the question of welfare and workfare programs — how did you go about balancing those issues and accommodating them?

On abortion, this was a case where I think the conflict was worked out just as it should have been. At the founding convention, there were two heavily Catholic unions, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and a bakers’ local, which threatened to walk out in response to the abortion language that was in the program.

The program committee met with them. There was a lot of tense back and forth shuttling of documents and suggestions. In the end, we worked out language that was still for abortion: “for  unimpeded access to a full range of family planning and reproductive services for men and women, including the right to continue or terminate a pregnancy.”

That was compromise language. In this case, that compromise held, and the program was passed and the union all stayed there. I think it’s a good example of what happens when a group in your coalition has a minority view, but people are focused on the value of unity and the value of working things out genuinely — not grandstanding and trying to prove how radical and correct they are, but taking into account the larger goals and the difficulty of bringing together workers with differing views into the kind of organization that it’s going to take to win.

The Labor Party was an effort to unite around the deep and very neglected issues having to do with class power, and we had agreement on those. Those were not problems. Then [we worked] out the areas where we had disagreement through a genuinely democratic process. Unions, even the ones that aren’t great, do teach people to work together even when they disagree on things. It’s something I think the Left could learn a lot about from unions.

But I think the other thing that people are asking when they talk about abortion and these other things is really, “Aren’t unions sexist? Is the Labor Party going to be of any use for women?” My answer is that we were able to make some provisional advances in feminism in the 1960s without directly confronting corporate power. And they were significant, but we’ve long since hit a wall, and we are going backward because we have failed to deal with the corporate dictatorship that rules our lives.

So you can “#MeToo” all you want, but as long as you’re still going to work where the boss has power over your economic survival, sexual harassment is going to flourish. We need the power to make that stop. And the way you do that is either you have full employment and national health care, or a union where you can make it stop.

I think this is a time for feminists to unite with everyone else who’s making this question of corporate power central. That’s basically working-class organizations. That’s the only way we’re going to win things that we need as people and be able to move forward again, even on specifically feminist demands.

On workfare: this was an easy one to explain to union members if you approach it right. Do you want somebody forced to work for subminimum wage, often replacing a union public worker? Or do you want to have a fully funded public sector that would hire unemployed people into union jobs?

The Labor Party published a paper on what was going on, but basically the short answer was that our bigger program was all about full employment: the right to a job at a living wage. And until you have the right to a job, someone’s going to be unemployed. So what’s the labor movement approach to that? It’s jobs for all, which also has the effect of creating a floor and taking away the sting of losing your job, so you can fight for better conditions. Same thing with universal health care — if you take the coercion out of it, disconnect it from the job, then you have more power on the job just by nature of that.

This was a basic argument that there are things you can’t win on the job as a union, which have to be fought for in the political arena, and if we won them, they would give us more power.

I wanted to share a little bit more about what happened with the abortion issue. California nurses had worked on that language. At the last hour, the night before the convention, Baldemar Velásquez of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee said he wants to meet with the program committee.

He told us that if we have that plank on abortion in there, they’re walking out. He has devout Catholics. [He said,] “Why are we putting that in there? That’s not a labor issue. And it’s so divisive. If you take it out, there won’t be any problem.”

We said, “Baldemar, wait a minute. If we took that out, half the people in that convention would be furious with us. So don’t think that taking it out means there’s no controversy. Most of the women in this, and men too, believe that that is a very important right.”

Someone came up with the idea, “Let’s not use the word ‘abortion.’ If we use the phrase ‘access to the full range of reproductive services,’ will you be able to convince your members to stay?”

Velásquez thought about it because he didn’t want to leave; he really wanted to be a part of this. And we wanted very much for them to be there, because we needed that diversity in the Labor Party to begin with. He came back an hour later and said, “We’re in.”

There were some feminists [who criticized that] — JoAnn Wypijewski wrote an article in the Nation lambasting us for being to the right of the Democratic Party because we didn’t have the word “abortion” in there. But as Jenny said, it was the right solution, and it made sense to people. And as Jane Slaughter said: “Don’t we want people in the party who aren’t necessarily in favor of abortion? Do we want to exclude all those people from our party?”

What was it about that moment when the Labor Party was launched and where the Democratic Party in particular was that made it feel necessary to launch a different party, and do you see a parallel today? You touched on this earlier, but I’m thinking here also about the Jesse Jackson campaigns, the disillusionment with working-class participation in Democratic Party elections in general. . . How did all that factor into the decision to launch a party?

A lot of people involved in the Labor Party project had been involved in Jesse Jackson’s two election campaigns, seeing how the party maneuvered to marginalize those [campaigns’] issues and other primary challenges. They had seen that the Democratic Party was unified around this neoliberal, anti-worker marginalization approach. They didn’t see that it was possible to move it. And I think they also learned through the Jackson campaigns [and some other efforts] that trying to intervene within the Democratic Party electorally has a very limited value.

It’s important to do, because there’s no other way to intervene electorally. You have to be there. But it never leaves anything in its wake. You’re always playing defense; you’re always responding to the latest outrage. You’re not really building a permanent structure that can supplant or transform those parties into true working-class parties. So they were really ready to try something new.

I would say it had to do with the nature of the changes taking place in the labor movement. If you look at the trajectory in the 1930s and the first part of the ’40s, we had a militant, class-conscious labor movement. The McCarthy era and the Cold War was about smashing that and destroying it. And unfortunately, a large section of the labor leadership gleefully took part in that and became labor statesmen — or as some would call them, “capital’s lieutenants in labor.” That led us down the road to the point where we were a paper tiger that Reagan was able to blow over in the ’80s.

But in the late 1960s and early ’70s, there was actually an upsurge with a lot of rank-and-file activity in the labor movement, based in all of the fights that were taking place — whether it was the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, or the anti–Vietnam War movement. Those folks had become shop-floor leaders in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and by later in the ’80s, they were starting to come into leadership in some of the unions.

So you had that base there when we got into the ’90s, and it’s why you were seeing the developments like TDU being able to grab power for a short period in the Teamsters and other folks coming up in other unions. Folks were there in enough different unions that we had a critical mass to talk about these things, combined with the Democrats showing their total bankruptcy in terms of any expectation that they’re actually serving the needs of the working class.

I’d argue that we’re at a similar point again now. Even in the highest ranks of labor, there’s been discussion [about] what the Democrats have done, and the kind of campaign they ran, and the candidates they’re choosing, and what people have seen in terms of the marginalization of Bernie, just the same way it was done to Jesse Jackson. It’s opened more eyes to how the Democratic Party can’t solve our problems for us and we’ve got to solve them ourselves.

And most union leaders have been banging their heads against the question, “What can we do on behalf of our members?” and are being driven into having to take stronger and stronger positions. And then this whole generation that’s been coming into the labor movement over the last twenty years — there’s a reason why everybody under forty-five is so pro-union. It’s because they’ve been victims of an economy that has been on a continual downward slide in terms of taking care of the economic needs of working people. Those folks are now playing a real role in the labor movement and are in a position to get that kind of momentum again now.

Picking up on that, why didn’t the Labor Party run candidates in the Democratic Party primaries? Would you see it differently now in the context of Bernie and the Squad and so on? What were the experiences with ballot issues and what was the strategic thinking around that?

I was on the Electoral Committee, so I spent a lot of long hours and a lot of meetings [on that], and there was a tension there. Tony Mazzocchi’s vision from the beginning was that we’ve got to build a movement before we can be an electoral organization. But there were others who definitely wanted to move toward elections quickly.

This movement concept was, you’ve got to build a working-class movement congressional district by congressional district — or whatever the area was — and that meant getting a good number of unions on board who were in that area, so you had some density there among the labor movement. And then [you would go out] and actually do on-the-ground organizing, making use of the issues that we would be running on at some point, so you had an actual base there that would support you if you got into office and came under attack by capital. You better have some people who are going to have your back, or you’re not going to be able to stand up to it, was the thinking.

That meant, pretty much by definition, that we’re going to be building this separate organization, this separate party. If we tried to do it within the Democratic Party, we were going to get subsumed by all of the corruption and poison that runs through the Democratic Party and that overtakes anybody who has tried to do that from within. And so I think that was the thinking there.

We made very strict criteria [to meet] before you could actually run. We were concerned that there would be a rump group of people who declared themselves the Labor Party in an area that had no real labor support or anything, and all of a sudden they’re running candidates who are marginal and would be basically an embarrassment to us — because instead of demonstrating we can do this, they would be demonstrating we can’t do this. We didn’t want to be the Green Party.

We made the requirements so stringent that they essentially constricted us from ever running candidates during that period, and the moment passed. Because of the changes in the economy, changes in the labor movement — the fact that George W. Bush came into office and 9/11 happened — there were a whole series of things, although I would argue changes in the labor movement were the most important piece of it.

Having it to do over, if I were sitting on that Electoral Committee again, I would probably say: Let’s find a couple places to really concentrate on and make it work and put all our resources there and do a proof of concept, so that others will pick up on it and we get other unions on board. But we didn’t have that.

The other thing we didn’t have then, that I would hope we could have now if we tried something again, is large national unions that could have brought in substantially more resources. If we could have made that breakthrough, it might have made a difference too in terms of what we could have done electorally.

We need to underline that issue of resources, because a lot of people don’t realize what that meant to us. At one point, the AFL-CIO put up $65 million to, I think, reelect Clinton. We were thinking to ourselves, if we had $1 million of that $65 million . . . if you keep doing your Democratic Party work and give us that million a year, what we could do with that. . . .

We had three national organizers for the whole country trying to organize the Labor Party full-time. Everyone else was doing it on top of their full-time jobs. It was very, very difficult. If we had some serious resources, which would come from some bigger unions, that would have been enormously helpful to us. But we didn’t get that.

We were close — who knows what could have happened if Ron Carey didn’t get bounced out of the Teamsters at that moment. There’s a good chance he might have moved in our direction. Having the Teamsters would have been enormously important, but it didn’t go that way. It was that problem that really put the kibosh on our efforts.

I agree. There was this feeling of the window closing, basically, because the labor movement had this uptick, which we thought was going to continue and did not continue. They were back to kicking our asses again. That’s the basic underlying problem that we were facing.

But the concept of a labor party was explicitly, we’re not going to run on the Democratic Party line. We’re not going to run fusion candidates. We’re going to be our own candidates. We’re going to select them by convention.

Had we been part of a labor movement that was organizing a million new workers a year, and had we been able to build our density within that movement, we would have figured out how to do this.

It’s always easy to see things so clearly in the rear-view mirror. It probably was a mistake to launch the party before we had greater density before we understood what shape this union revival was going to take. We probably should have kept a looser Labor Party Advocates structure, maybe not overpromise to people what a party ought to be doing.

There are two things that it’s important to think about proactively. We could talk about all the debates we had in basements in 1998 about this stuff, but we really ought to be using this discussion to think about: How the hell are we going to deal with the fact that the working class has abandoned the Democratic Party or is in the process of abandoning the Democratic Party? And because there’s no other alternative, many working-class people — not all of them, but many of them — are flocking to this right-wing populist vision that a strongman can intervene on your behalf and win things that you can no longer win through collective action.

That’s really the challenge. One thing we learned in the Labor Party was that it’s very hard for people who are on the front lines battling the bosses every day to think about how to strategically disengage from the Democratic Party while they’re building an alternative. Because it’s like you’re laying down whatever few shields and weapons you have, and they’re forging the new ones over there. But the bosses are coming right at you, and what are you going to do?

That’s the quandary we’re in. Some of these people were just Democratic Party followers who would do whatever Bill Clinton told them to do. But a lot of these people who were on different sides of these debates were really struggling with: What the hell am I going to do? I represent hospital workers in New York City, and the governor determines the Medicaid reimbursement rate, and if I don’t endorse him, he’s going to screw 100,000 of my members in the next budget cycle. How do you figure that stuff out?

The Labor Party ran into various impasses. Was a different outcome possible or was the way that things went inevitable? Could things have turned out differently? Or was it just that the conditions were not right?

It’s easy to look back and say, we should have done this or that. We couldn’t tell what was going to happen. We thought Andy Stern was going to be more progressive than he ended up being, and that maybe the SEIU [Service Employees International Union] would come on board. That would have been incredible. I’m very excited about what’s happening in the United Auto Workers because if that was happening, we would have really had something.

But we didn’t know. And if we had waited actually, things were going to get worse. What Mark said is probably right: we would have had to fall back to being the LPA and continuing that work, which wouldn’t have been the end of the ball game either. If we were going to try something again, you know, I would probably say we should go slow and carefully and make sure we get that critical mass of progressive unions that want to support us seriously — not just give us a few thousand dollars once in a while, like Andy Stern did, but really go to bat for us and start putting up some resources. Then we could really start doing something.

That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything else. In their article “Labor Party Time? Not Yet” from 2012, Mark and Katherine Isaac talk about doing other things, like working for single-payer health care and other kinds of issue campaigns that can still bring up class politics and excite people without having to run candidates immediately.

I’m not opposed, by the way, under certain circumstances, to Carl’s idea of an experiment [in running candidates] here or there. If you really had a strong base, that would be worth doing.

Was a different outcome possible in the ’90s? Probably not. The fact that I said in retrospect, we should have moved faster, and Mark said, we should have moved slower, I think, tells you we didn’t really have a path.

But I want to take on Howard’s point that we need to patiently build right now. I would argue a) we can’t afford to be too patient because of what we’re facing, and b) because of the changes that have occurred now, because such a larger section of the working class has deserted the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that’s in charge right now is not actually going to deliver for the great bulk of the folks who voted for them — especially those from the working class  — there are going to be new possibilities here that we need to look at how we can take advantage of. And the militancy in the younger generation . . . we can’t afford to not harness that. It would be a crime against working-class struggle for us not to figure out how to take advantage of that.

Then we have some examples already; we have a proof of concept. Dan Osborn ran in Nebraska on a relatively shoestring [campaign], especially in terms of what was developed there organizationally beforehand. He had led a strike, and he was standing up on a very populist working-class agenda. And he came close to knocking off a very well-funded incumbent Republican senator.

The reason these areas that are “red,” are very heavily Republican, is that the labor movement got wiped out in those areas by NAFTA. All of those midsize factories that were in those areas are all gone, and that was the unions. So all that’s left generally are right-wing churches. But that doesn’t mean the people who live there aren’t still working-class folks and farmers and others who need a different solution than what’s being foisted on them.

So if we could get some unions together — and look, a labor party of some sort is not going to be able to be built just on the labor union movement. There’s no way; we don’t represent enough people. But we are the organized part of the working class, and we have some resources and some organization. Perhaps we could go out and do some proof-of-concept races in some places. And I would argue legislative races, not executive. Because any place where we can win a mayor’s seat, probably either we’re going to face a capital strike or the ruling class has already dumped that area into the waste bin.

But if we could start winning a bunch of legislative seats and congressional seats and other things, it could not only begin to form the basis for putting [a party] together, but it could also help turn the tide in terms of the narrative in this country about where politics are at. Because if you look at the issues, we still have the great bulk of the American people behind us on every issue that matters. And that’s what we have to find a way to harness.

I think we could combine doing that in areas where the Democrats have basically ceded the ground totally with maybe running some very hard labor, anti–Democratic Party establishment, anti–corporate Democrat folks in very urban areas, etc., with an understanding that these folks are running within the Democratic Party because in that area, it’s a one-party state: the election is the Democratic primary. I’m not averse to thinking maybe we elect some people in those areas and then eventually merge everything together under a new formation when we’ve got enough strength.

The problem here that we’d have to figure out is, how do you hold people accountable if you get them elected, and it’s not in some kind of structure. That’s something that requires a lot of thought. It may be that if we do try to run folks not as either Democrats or Republicans in some of these “red” areas, if there’s a way to have some kind of “labor” moniker on them — something that attaches them to something bigger than themselves — maybe we can do something. But I’m concerned about waiting too long.

There was a great article by Mark and Adolph Reed in Socialist Register from 2015, in which they basically say there’s no left [political] expression, and then several months later, the Bernie thing happened. So one thing that we don’t want to happen is for people to learn from our experience that you can’t do this. There are always possibilities we have to be alert to.

As the last national organizer of the Labor Party, I thought a lot about why we had to stop and what we maybe could have done differently. I’m as convinced as everybody else that we just ran out of history, that the tables turned, and whatever brilliant ideas we might have come up with, we probably couldn’t have outrun the early 2000s and the impact that they had. But I’m also convinced that we are at another crossroads right now, both because of the right-wing authoritarian takeover of the US government, and because of this incredible search and yearning for a party that speaks on behalf of working people.

There’s a lot of creative things we can do around electoral politics, and we ought to start trying them. In Chicago, there are all kinds of union-oriented caucuses and organizations that are pushing politics in really interesting ways, and in other places like that with high union density. Maybe there needs to be more of a collaborative sharing of experiences and perspectives on those experiences.

The rise of independent candidacies like Osborn in Nebraska are very interesting and unique. I think we need to take a longer view on that. We’ll see where they go. One thing you do when you run a good campaign like that is you wake up the Democratic Party, which maybe won’t be caught sleeping the next time. But that was very much of a breakthrough campaign.

Another area where there’s huge potential is issue campaigns. Almost every state that’s ever had a referendum on raising the minimum wage has raised the minimum wage, has defended women’s rights to abortion, and so on. We can begin to engage people perhaps around issue campaigns.

We also have to understand that party building is really much more than just electoralism. That’s the problem, particularly in this country. We really ought to think about why it is so different to try to build a labor party in the United States versus Australia — parliamentary systems and all that kind of stuff. . . . How do you hold people accountable? It’s a lot more than just electoralism.

And in many cases, overemphasis on the next election actually gets in the way of thinking about how we’re going to build independent working-class politics. And we need to think about how we can continue to move through these electoral cycles, which seem to get shorter and shorter because they start up right after the last one ends, to bring together a disoriented and demoralized working class.

That has to be at the center of our politics. [We need to] start talking to working people about what issues bring them into action and what issues they’re passionate about and how we can articulate that in politics.

We’re not going to announce the relaunching of the Labor Party effort at this point. That is not going to be productive [right now]. But there’s a lot to learn from the history here, and from other histories too. Bernie’s campaigns are incredibly informative. And even things like the Red for Ed movements that swept the country a few years back, showing a very much more horizontal way of organizing that had both surprising immediate success and then problems in terms of sustaining that success. Those are the kind of things that we need to study and learn from.

Whatever we’re doing in terms of party building, we have to be thinking for the long term, not just the very next election. What that’s really about is building class consciousness. That was what the Labor Party platform was about. And taking on the issue campaigns in the districts is about getting people to understand which side they’re on, and why the solution to their problems is to take away corporate power and build worker power, whether it’s through unions or at the ballot box or wherever else.

So when I talk about experimenting with running candidates here and there, it needs to be on the basis of issues that are going to raise up people’s class consciousness and not ignoring the class issues. They’ve got to be centered there and be very sharp anti-corporate campaigns.

Mark mentioned both Bernie and Red for Ed. So what those have — what we have now that we did not have in the 1990s — is an understanding of distributed organizing. In the 1930s, a lot of the labor movement was organized by the workers themselves. Not entirely, but big pieces of it — it’s the way my union, UE, was organized. That got lost over the generations, and not by accident, I’d say, but on purpose, because workers who organize themselves retain that power. And it’s a threat to the status quo of the higher-ups in the union.

Bernie showed this distributed organizing model for the Democratic Party; I don’t think the Democratic Party is going to want to use it in the same way because, again, you’re liberating people to run their own lives. And a good piece of why we would want to do it among working people is because it allows them to start to understand they can run society. They don’t have to have some overlords doing it for them. They can take things on and take things over and pull the levers themselves.

That’s UE’s approach to union organizing, and a few other unions do it too. But it takes the leap of faith that if we show workers who are organizing how to run their own unions, they’re going to want to continue to build this union and do it jointly with the folks who are already here and have been building it. Most unions don’t have that outlook unfortunately. Some of them are moving toward it a little bit more. That’s the kind of electoral work I think we need to be doing. It’s what Bernie showed can succeed. Things can change rapidly if we can figure out how to make that happen.

And if thousands of people in a congressional district have been involved in building their own campaign, then if we’re smart about it, we can create a way to force accountability. Because now you’ve got this organization of real people.

I don’t disagree with that at all. As the cochair of the New York Labor Party, I have a little bit of a different perspective on that one issue. I think DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] people have had a little taste of what can happen if you have mostly left folks who have various axes to grind and don’t have a mass base that they’re representing — it can get dicey and destructive and become an enormous waste of resources.

We had people who were absolutely dedicated to the Labor Party, and as soon as it fell apart, one of them ran for governor under the Green Party. The politics came out clearly — okay, that’s what you wanted to do. You have to have that working-class base before we can work on that experimentation. That can happen in some districts, as you said, where you can test the concept. I just want to make sure we do that and that we do that hard organizing work of going door to door, which Tony was always harping on — go door to door, go and talk to people, whatever it is.

Especially now that we have the internet, and we tend to think that’s a substitute for real organizing work — we’ve got to do that hard work to build that base, and then maybe we’ll have something.